Letters from the Lost

by Wilkes, Helen Waldstein

• ISBN13: 9781897425534
• ISBN10: 1897425538
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-30
• Publisher: Athabasca Univ

Summary

On March 15, 1939, Helen Waldstein’s father snatched the last exit visa from a distracted clerk to get his wife and child out of Prague. The family left behind could only send letters after the Nazis closed in. Through the war years, letters kept coming to the southern Ontario farm where Helen’s small family learned to speak English, to be Canadian farmers, and to forget they were Jewish. Helen did not notice when the letters stopped coming, but they surfaced intermittently until she couldn’t ignore them anymore. Reading the letters changed everything. As her past refused to keep silent, Helen followed the trail of letters back to Europe to find living witnesses of what the letters related. She has here interwoven their stories and her own in an engrossing narrative of suffering and rescue, survivor guilt, and overcoming obstacles to intergenerational dialogue about a traumatic past.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgements	p. xv
Map	p. xvii
Family Tree	p. xix
Opening the Box	p. l
Leaving Home	p. 19
Letters to Antwerp	p. 27
Starting Over	p. 45
Letters to Canada	p. 65
Searching In Europe: 1997-1998	p. 79
My Aunts and Uncles	p. 107
My Grandparents	p. 121
War Breaks Out	p. 137
The Family Copes	p. 157
The Letters Stop	p. 173
Imagining	p. 187
After the War	p. 195
Finding Home	p. 229
Searching for Family Again	p. 235
Searching for Family One Last Time	p. 257
Epilogue	p. 265
Endnotes	p. 277
Selected Bibliography	p. 279
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